How could Christianity, which in its foundation documents has no honour code and categorically rejects reciprocal violence, become implicated in what it most vehemently rejects? How could the text of the Sermon on the Mount become the Sacred Scripture of the crusaders without the evident contradiction sparking a social convulsion or the direct and unequivocal repudiation of Christianity by the principalities and the powers? How could aristocracies based on blood ties and feudal obligations of service owed by serf to lord tolerate a liturgy that in the Magnificat daily promises to ‘put down the mighty from their seats’ and exalt ‘the humble and meek’? How could merchants bent on accumulating wealth at all costs regularly recite a Scripture which sends the rich ‘empty away’ and preaches ‘good news’ to the poor? To Christians who take the New Testament seriously, the facts of Christian history pose a moral problem that can become surprisingly acute. We should not be surprised at that. The main reason Christians find Christian history such a moral problem is because they are Christians.
To sociologists Christian history poses no problem at all because the exigencies of power in different situations and in different types of society inflect and deflect the religious template built into the ‘official’ ideology of dominant elites. What else? The religious template appears to be radically unsuitable for a society based on a rigid social hierarchy and a warrior ethic, yet the hierarchy of the Church to a large extent mirrors the social hierarchy at large and supports a code of chivalry that in principle accepts the warrior ethic. The New Testament remains ‘on the books’, ceremonially elevated as the highest moral authority of a civilisation, and that means that elements of its radical iconography are incorporated in the iconography of power. The cross, once a sign of a convicted felon thrust outside the city, becomes a sign that claims dominion over the orbis terrarum. Galilee has become Christendom.
Of course, the original sign language remains in place as a ‘sign of contradiction’, to be picked up by those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, especially perhaps on the margins of society; but its impact will be partially confiscated, muted and reinterpreted, and those aspects of Sacred Scripture relatively amenable to the exigencies of power and hierarchy will be selectively emphasised. Almost I apologise for pointing out what ought to be obvious yet is not at all obvious because these self-evident facts of a very extensive assimilation to a warrior ethic and a feudal hierarchy (or, to take a later instance, an extensive assimilation to the burgeoning commercial cultures of Amsterdam and London) are cited against Christianity as such, including its radical template. The history of the most comprehensive revolution in history is cited against itself.
What happened in the late Roman Empire, East and West, in the Middle Ages, and in early modernity, is just what you would expect given the stark realities of our biological inheritance, and above all given the dynamics of wealth and power and the social solidarity of Us versus Them. Political necessity will for the most part, but not entirely, override a Gospel message opposed to violence and all that is entailed by ‘great possessions’, and sequester just those images and texts from Sacred Scripture that suit its purposes. What remains crucial is not the extent to which the Gospel message is overridden but the extent to which it remains on the books to be read, recited and sometimes heeded. Even kings can hear and within the limits of their warrior code heed the message, as when Athelstan in tenth-century England sought penance and absolution for his violent disposal of a royal rival. Assimilation is inevitable, but an alternative has been written into the script of a civilisation beyond erasure. For the rest feudal kings and lords will select those narratives that extol the ‘God of battles’ and the mighty deeds of ‘the Lord’s Anointed’; expansive early modern monarchies will select images of the supposedly expansive and prosperous monarchies of David and Solomon; early modern republicans will turn to a covenant relation between God and the People based on unhappy experiences of the institution of kingship recorded in Scripture concerning Saul or Ahab or Jeroboam (‘the man who made Israel to sin’); and some people, often but not always on the margins, will proclaim the equality of all made in the image of God, share goods in common and reject the ius gladii.
I have already given the obvious answer to my initial questions, but it has scant chance of being taken on board because it runs athwart powerful ideological narratives that presuppose the intrinsic implication of religion in violence, not to mention injustice and repression. These narratives load the ‘blame’ onto religion for what is built into the exigencies of social organisation under various constraints, and treat religion as a scapegoat for what on any realistic assessment is bound to happen. Indeed, some of those who load the blame on to religion are themselves notable advocates of realism about the likely course of human affairs. That is why towards the conclusion of my argument I give an account of the ideological narratives on which critics of religion, both realist and utopian, draw. At the same time one can hardly expect western intellectuals to give up these narratives when they provide such an endless source of historical self-congratulation, historical innocence and personal righteousness.
So my first question about Christianity’s fall from grace into violence generates my second question. Why does such a large segment of the western intelligentsia continue to propagate an ideologically saturated account of the problem of religion and violence when it poses no problem at all? The problem exists precisely for Christians who have not taken the measure of everything implied by the survival of the fittest, or who are at the very least not reconciled to it. It also exists for those secular people who are so unconsciously imbued with the hopes of a better world set forth in the Gospel (and elsewhere) that the realities of the human condition as revealed by history and social science, let alone biology, make the whole world seem out of joint. That is just what the Christian Gospel does both for those who believe and for those who find in the facts of Christian history incontrovertible reason not to believe. Of course, there is one explanation that would seriously truncate my argument. If we set aside sheer intellectual incompetence and conscious malpractice on the part of those who load the onus of human misery onto a phantom entity they denominate ‘religion’ (as though unconscious of how the term is embedded historically and indifferent to its incoherence), we are left with reluctance on the part of natural scientists and the arbiters of opinion to understand the problems and practices of sciences that do not project missiles or manipulate genes. Sociology shows that what happened historically is just what you would expect to happen; but sociology is not sufficiently understood or taken on board for a ‘most favoured’ narrative blaming religion to be dumped on the rubbish heap of failed explanations and distorted representations.
The obvious answer to my first question about the historical distortion of the Christian Gospel lies in the varying relationships of Christianity to particular historical situations, particular modes of social organisation and different kinds of power. You cannot treat the relation of Christianity to war and violence as a constant. Any statement about Christianity in general in relation to violence, let alone about religion in general, is liable to verbal sleights of hand, ideological misrepresentation and circular arguments. That is why I discuss below the problem of rhetorical ‘sentences’, by which I mean opinions encapsulated in minute linguistic packages demarcated by a subject, verb and object, as these are deployed in public debate. These packages are vehicles for the concentrated dissemination of the ‘most favoured’ ideological narrative and have little if anything to do with scientific discourse in either the natural or the social sciences.
The answer to my second question about the dominance and persistence of ideological narratives that lay much or even most of the onus for the violence of human history on ‘religion’ is more complicated and less easy to put across. These narratives – so useful, normative and emotionally satisfying to western elites, and so inimical to any sociological understanding of the relation of religion to violence – have themselves to be situated and contextualised in terms of historic struggles for dominance, above all in France. It is this French narrative I highlight in the concluding section of this particular sequence of discussion.
No wonder these ideological narratives appear more obviously true than my obvious sociological answer, and no wonder my all-too-easy answer is so difficult to get across. It does not fit a wider story. What intelligent person would forgo the effortless rhetorical advantage of excoriating and demanding the excision of the remnants of Christian civilisation in the cause of peace on earth and goodwill among peoples, as well as in the name of scientific truth and public virtue? Who would give up the pleasures of proclaiming unique historical innocence and assuming the mantle of a moral heroism allied to an intellectual honesty and superiority, particularly in the role of the knower, the scientific hero? Who would relinquish so simple and at the same time so moral an answer to a contentious question, only to get lost in an interminable and indeterminate enquiry in a social scientific discipline for which your average humane warrior for the truth has neither understanding nor respect?
There is another blockage in the way of accepting a social scientific answer to the question of religion and violence. It is that this same most favoured narrative includes a sub-narrative about the rationality of the public sphere within which such issues are debated and the ‘most favoured narrative’ disseminated. Two delusions would have to be jettisoned simultaneously, and that is far too much to expect if you have any realistic assessment of human affairs. The virtual domination of the public sphere with ideologically saturated narratives is self-evident whatever ideal visions and philosophical disquisitions one might propose as to what ought to be the case. The public sphere is demonstrably not an arena for the free passage of rational discussion and conversation between equals. On the contrary, it has become an arena for sensational and personalised ‘news’, for mediatised razzmatazz further debased by the advent of new technology and for gladiatorial polemics encapsulated in just the kind of sentences I propose to analyse. The rational content of conversation in the public sphere is time and again no more than an exchange between celebrities granted special licence on account of irrelevant credentials, and in the context of discussions about ‘religion’ and violence the credentials of a natural scientist, Richard Dawkins, provide the most obvious case in point.
When it comes to religion and violence, or Christianity and violence, context is all, or nearly all. There are several critiques of Christianity, including one by Nietzsche that dismisses it as the religion of slaves and of slavish compassion for the underdog. Nietzsche’s view can be set aside because there is much to be said for it. Only two critiques are worth taking up for our purposes here. One critique dismisses Christianity as politically passive and quietist, and therefore indifferent to the necessary virtues of soldier and citizen in defence of the polity or the human right of the citizen to wage revolutionary war against tyrants. The other critique dismisses Christianity as chronically inclined to exceed the requirements of legitimate defence by supporting aggressive wars, sometimes in the cause of ‘Christian civilisation’, sometimes in the cause of confessional states like Poland and Sweden or of nations loosely defined as Christian, like the USA. To ask why there are two such contradictory critiques implies the answer. Whether Christianity is dismissed as too aggressive or too passive in part depends on whether it is defined as the ideological mainstay of a civilisation or nation state, or as a voluntary group. Christianity began as the latter and became the former, and therefore reflected the modes of power and forms of violence characteristic of the social contexts in which it was embedded.
In the case of the Roman Empire, Christianity can be dismissed by enlightened rationalism, for example by Edmund Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as leaving to others the defence of civilisation against barbarism and replacing civic virtue in the here and now by an intolerant and superstitious asceticism focussed on the world to come. In the case of the warring city states of the Renaissance, the peaceable enclaves of Christian monasticism can be decried by the representatives of the Prince as evading the duties incumbent on citizens and encouraging an effeminate and ignorant preoccupation with ‘another world’. The state churches of the Renaissance period took the same attitude to the voluntary Christian groups that emerged on the radical wing of the Reformation. In Article 37 of its Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the Church of England explicitly condemned those who refused to take up arms at the command of the magistrate and ‘serve in the wars’. Article 37 and Article 38 condemning community of goods together remind us of the issues constantly raised in the radical Christian tradition, including, of course, the Radical Reformation.
In the developing world today some forms of Christianity, for example Pentecostalism, can be accused of failing to take up arms against oppressive regimes by people who in other contexts accuse Christianity of being all too prone to legitimate violence. According to Claudio Véliz (in a personal communication), a great many women in Latin America were very fed up with the macho posturing of their irresponsible menfolk. They were attracted to Pentecostalism because it replaced the violent street with the peaceful commensality of the domestic table. Some men were only too relieved to become domesticated and put their Kalashnikovs in storage, roughly following the pacific vision of Isaiah where spears are converted into pruning hooks. Different historical and cultural contexts generate different narratives about Christianity and violence. These will change markedly in the course of the transition from a pagan empire to the Catholic civilisations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and in the course of the transition from the early modern confessional state to the kind of global voluntarism represented by Pentecostalism. Serious discussion of religion and violence demands systematic cross-cultural comparison, yet that is almost entirely lacking in contemporary debate. Cross-cultural comparison according to norms well established since J.S. Mill is the sine qua non of serious debate, yet all we have is the indiscriminate citation of instances taken out of context solely to serve the purposes of an ideologically predetermined conclusion.
I pivot my discussion on the emergence of an aggressive ‘New Atheist’ critique of religion that privileges the negative narrative over the positive, and does so from a ‘scientific’ viewpoint which contravenes every norm of social scientific investigation. That forces me to engage to some extent with the difference between statements made by natural scientists about the physical and biological worlds and statements made by social scientists about the human world. The difference between the scientific intentionality appropriate to socio-historical issues and the scientific intentionality appropriate to natural phenomena is crucial, and yet it is systematically elided. Indeed, the social sciences are abused precisely because they adopt a scientific intentionality and methodology appropriate to their subject matter. The human world can only be understood scientifically if you understand means and ends, meanings, motives and intentions as these are variably realised in widely different contexts. The arguments about causation appropriate to social science operate according to a different ceteris paribus clause to those of natural science because social science has to deal with subjectivity and, therefore, with the sheer specificity and contingency of history and historical location. Social science must cope with meaningful narrative.
Yet, as already indicated, the ‘New Atheists’ persist in citing assorted instances of religion and war taken indifferently from different periods, different types of society and different situations, irrespective of context, provided they illustrate their claims. This represents bad faith on a massive scale, and yet it is applauded as the exploits of a modern Mr Valiant-for-Truth. The ‘New Atheists’ pay scant attention to the constructed and historically embedded nature of the categories deployed, notably ‘religion’ and ‘science’, and they successfully avoid any nuanced scrutiny of the degree and kind of religious involvement in war and violence, as that varies, say, between the Knights Templar in 1320 and the Quakers and others who founded the first Peace Societies in 1816. Above all they fail to enquire why, say, Christianity and Buddhism embrace non-violence in their origins and foundation documents, and yet embrace violence elsewhere with what might seem to be unseemly enthusiasm, apart from the banal observation that when Christians or Buddhists come to power they change their tune. The observation is worse than banal because those Christians who eventually came to occupy the seats of power in Rome in the centuries after Constantine were not the same people, nor did they come from the same social stratum, as those persecuted under various emperors from Nero to Diocletian.1
It is distinctly odd when a public debate by ‘scientists’ conforms to the quick fixes, rhetorical ploys and gladiatorial confrontations between celebrities characteristic of the public sphere. Perhaps this is because these contributions to public debate seek to firm up slack atheist identities rather than advance social scientific understanding. It is almost equally odd that the animus manifested against religion on the grounds of its violence appears to derive from a standpoint that takes the Sermon on the Mount as the baseline for criticism. This is what I mean by the unconscious assimilation of the perspectives of the Christian Gospel by self-conscious secularists who take on board precisely the disjunction that Gospel generates between what we might hope for and what we indubitably observe. I do not for one moment suggest that ‘New Atheists’ like Richard Dawkins believe in the Sermon on the Mount as a rule of life for themselves, though they clearly regard it as one of the least ‘offensive’ texts in Scripture. I mean that they talk as though they, and all other enlightened persons, agree that war is an unequivocal evil along lines that approximate classical Christian pacifism and which may even draw persuasive power from the prestige enjoyed by the Sermon on the Mount.
They do this without any rational consideration of the proper occasions of war, whether in defence of civilisation against barbarism, in revolt against tyranny or in defence of the state against international predators.2 Worse, they proceed in insouciant indifference to the findings of science. Given their pretensions this is peculiarly offensive. The natural science of biology proclaims the struggle for survival to be an empirical norm of the biological and social world alike, so that there can be nothing empirically surprising or morally outrageous about its prevalence in all the discourses of power, religious or otherwise. It is richly paradoxical that ‘New Atheists’, in particular Richard Dawkins, should document empirically the inevitability of the struggle for survival, and even in some cases proclaim the (dubious) malign inevitability of religion, and at the same time complain morally about these quasi-natural phenomena as though they believed in the doctrine of free will and had never heard of Kant’s famous dictum that ‘ought implies can’. This is like screaming moral abuse at a car for refusing to start: it is as infantile as it is unrealistic. Unless ‘New Atheists’ are willing to set out in depth what they regard as the proper occasions of war, for example in defence of peace, this amounts to moral free-loading and free-wheeling on an impressive scale. They are like individual snipers firing opportunistically from hidden positions, and acknowledging no principle of internal consistency. Impact is all.
When people in the name of science ignore the norms of social science and fail to specify the proper occasions of violence, they further debase public debate. Public debate licenses the verbal violence of ‘scientific’ celebrities and encourages them to maraud at will beyond the sphere of their competence. My argument examines the rhetorical moves made by participants in public debate, in particular the ‘New Atheists’.
With regard to the special character of the social sciences (understood as the pre-eminent site for any serious discussion of religion and violence) I argue that they include provinces of meaning that exhibit the distinctive truths of human and social existence. These are the concern of all the social sciences, of history, art and literature, and of the theologies of the major world religions. I make no apologies for referring unequivocally to truths that fall outside the natural science model as ‘truths’ in spite of all the dogmatic statements that endeavour to restrict truth claims to one mode of natural scientific observation and in spite of the pan-relativism adopted by some exponents of post-modernism.
There are forms of observation that illuminate vast ranges of carefully sifted experience or paradigmatically summarise and re-present the realities of the human condition, and there are other forms of observation and paradigmatic summaries that mis-represent that experience and distort those realities. The former I count as true, the latter as false. Moreover, it should not be that difficult to devise a spectrum running from extended observation to paradigmatic representation together with some indication of the way criteria of judgement require appropriate modification as one moves from one end of the spectrum to the other. Some of those modifications relate to a further spectrum of major importance that runs from exempla centred on collective entities and exempla focussed in varying degrees on the individual. One needs to modify criteria of judgement as one moves from (say) the violent collective reactions of Hungarians and Serbs to what they perceive as paradigmatic historic defeats; to Schiller’s play Wallenstein where individual characters are both agents and victims of the multitudinous sources of violence in the ‘wars of religion’; and then to the dramatis personae of the Passion story focussed on Christ as both individual agent and victim. True representation includes specific situations and individuals which dramatically focus the paradigmatic action. One of the classic complaints about Christianity focusses on ‘the scandal of particularity’, but there is no such scandal outside the specific domain of abstracted reason and generalised empirical observation. History includes the particular, and it includes the general understood most comprehensively and profoundly in the particular.
Distorted observation, and partial or mis-representation, define what is not true. In short, the concept of truth cannot be abandoned in the human sphere any more than it can be abandoned in the sphere of natural science. The concept of criticism is unintelligible without it, and the intellectual task is to give an account of its modes. One has to ask how an account of corruption and of its corrosive consequences in politics and economics differs from the account of the corrosive and tragic effects of, say, jealousy such as you find in Shakespeare’s Othello or from the account of the moral deteriorations and likely tragic denouement following from the pursuit of untrammelled power at all costs such as you find in Goethe’s Faust. One has also to consider the truths about humanity and about the corruptions of power that are uncovered and discovered in the moral confrontations and likely tragic consequences that flow from the embrace of unflinching moral integrity and non-violence as these are depicted in the Gospels. I explore the varied kinds of truth shared by all the non-positivistic disciplines and choose eventually to focus on the kind of truth exhibited by the moral template of non-violence found in the foundation documents of Christianity, above all in the narrative of the Passion. I examine that narrative, as it derives directly from the Sermon on the Mount, because together the Sermon and the Passion story help generate the quite distinctive problematic of violence in Christian societies.
They do so precisely because the New Testament runs counter to the necessities of the struggle for survival exposed by both the social and the biological sciences. Internecine struggles and associated codes of face and honour constitute a default position in human history and present no problem, yet they are contradicted by the non-violent Christian template or repertoire. Struggle can be taken for granted, whereas non-violence requires explanation. The non-violence of the Sermon on the Mount as it is followed through and realised in the narrative of the Passion is scarcely the easiest aspect of Christianity to take on board given the obvious consequences of its adoption for the maintenance of a civilised or reasonably peaceful existence, or indeed for the continued existence of Christianity itself in a Europe threatened by hostile invaders for well over a millennium.
It is not in the least surprising that Christianity devised strategies of negotiation, compromise and assimilation as it spread in societies characterised by discourses of power and codes of honour. On the contrary, the history of Christianity – including all the objectionable inferences drawn from this or that element in the biblical narrative, say, about the nature of woman or sexuality, some of it based on the vast corpus of false and primitive science – follows precisely the course you would expect. You simply need to grasp the type of society in question and its stock of approved knowledge and to trace how that interacts with a religion whose original repertoire puts such a fundamental query against the raw realities of power.
In examining the process of negotiation, compromise and assimilation between the original repertoire and the kinds of face and honour found in different kinds of society, I focus on feudal monarchy and early modernity and the transition between them. Inevitably the Christian Church between 1250 and 1700 turned to those parts of its Scriptural repertoire most compatible with the types of society in which it exercised power, and found them most often in the Old Testament, though texts in Paul and the Pastoral Epistles also proved serviceable. Apart from the enactments of liturgy, which were in any case shrouded by a classical language, the presentation of Christianity was often loaded towards the Old Testament, so that rulers fashioned their self-understanding in the image of Solomon, David, Hezekiah or Josiah. Appropriations of the figure of Christ crucified by monarchs and ecclesiastics were much less popular because less plausible and persuasive, except when deployed at tangents that ignored the stripping away of the human dignity of Christ by the legally constituted authorities in ‘Church’ and state. The Godly Prince of the Renaissance ruling jure divino found scant gratification in the role of a convicted felon.
My discussion is divided into three. First I examine the nature of the debate on religion, war and violence, in particular the distorted relation between the logic of the social sciences and the rhetoric of public debate. I try to expose the disparity between the rhetoric of the main participants, particularly those who have become celebrities in the anti-religious cause, and what would be required by sociological enquiry. I make two moves. I foreground the miniaturised violence and verbal pugilism on display in the conduct of the debate. I then place this violence in the wider perspective of the endemic role of violence at every level of social interaction, from the most general, where nations struggle over territory, to the intimate duels and the parades of dominance over territory we find in domestic relations.
In my second section I develop the points I made earlier about the many varieties of truth aside from the truths promoted by natural science, at least when it is misgoverned by the restrictive protocols of philosophical positivism. Positivism is an add-on but is often implied by the approach of the ‘New Atheists’ when scorn is poured on all the varieties of observation, representation and truth-telling that do not conform to the natural science model. These other varieties of truth are found within the social sciences and in all the humanities – including history, literature, the arts and theology – and they are part of the defence of all these disciplines, especially theology, against contemporary kinds of attack framed in terms of alien criteria. One might in a preliminary way describe them as the truths of human existence, characterised by narrative and by the contingency of history. I need to repeat what I earlier indicated. The exempla I offer in this second section illustrate the kinds of truth found in historical and tragic drama, and the kind of truth about non-violence and violence uncovered and discovered in the kerygmatic Christian narrative of the Passion. They show that the moral integrity intrinsic to that narrative, from the initial announcement in the Sermon on the Mount to what is almost foreordained in the Passion, runs counter to ‘the grain of the universe’ as articulated by natural, biological, social and psychological science: Newton, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Machiavelli and Nietzsche.
In my third section I shift the discussion to the ideological sources of the debate about violence and religion and to the modes of argument intrinsic to these ideological sources. I contrast rival narratives about religion and violence, first those of the French and the American Enlightenments, and second those of Protestants and Catholics. I show how contemporary critiques adapt motifs selectively from negative aspects of these narratives and combine them with a revised version of the nineteenth-century opposition between fundamentalism and science. These critiques often pivot around the difference between the empirical provisionality of science and the non-empirical reliance on authority, especially the stabilised authority of texts made possible by the invention of alphabetic scripts, presumed to be characteristic of certain kinds of religion. I say ‘certain kinds of religion’ because stabilised texts are a late development and distinctly atypical in the longue durée of history, even though the axial religions of the last three millennia, with their sacred or normative texts, are now numerically dominant. This point is implicit in Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained where he shows that the religious forms of the Axial Age, in particular monotheism, are quite unrepresentative of religion in general, at least as he chooses to define it as the hyper-detection of agency in the interests of survival.3 Those forms of religion that might plausibly underwrite the idea that religion is to be ‘explained’ as the hyper-detection of agency have only a modest overlap with those forms that are stabilised in sacred texts accorded unique authority.
Curiously, there are forms of fundamentalist Christianity which believe that faith provides information about natural causation within the same universe of discourse as natural science. We have the strange spectacle of struggles between standard science and ‘Creation science’ equally based on false premises about the nature of Christianity: the blind ‘New Atheists’ wrestle with the blind ‘Creationists’, and they both stand and fall together as they stumble into the ditch.
I suggest that all our life choices and commitments, not simply those of religion, are non-empirical, and that these include the optimistic secular meta-narrative of progress.4 I cite various kinds of rhetorical manipulation, for example where rhetorical protagonists point to supposedly obvious instances of the involvement of religion in violence without further analysis of historical and cultural context. I conclude with two passages, one concerned with the conditions of justified war, and the other with the difference between the role of religion in archaic civilisations and in the Axial Age where the emergence of different angles of transcendence on the world creates meta-narratives within the major world religions in varying degrees contrary to ‘the grain of the universe’ as exposed by the biological and social sciences. Confucianism, Buddhism, the Indian scriptures, Islam, Judaism and Christianity all embody different angles of transcendence that provide varied vantage points to review the world as it is from different perspectives, for example the perspective of ‘the kingdom of God’, and have to engage in different modes of negotiation with the structures of power.
1 Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
2 Nigel Biggar, In Defence of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
3 Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (London: Vintage, 2001).
4 Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Reformation Secularized Society (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).